Idea: World Wide Whiteboard

Posted on January 7, 2012 by

I want someone to build a very simple, web-based drawing app that allows multiple people to see what’s being drawn in real time.  At the push of a button the service emails a jpeg of that drawing to all of the participants

I’d appreciate any pointers to this product.  If you want to build it, please contact me.  I will pay for this.

My Problem

For the first time in my career, I’m working with on a daily basis with someone located remotely.  It works better than I would have expected.  I think this is because we’re both native IMers, I finally started using Skype regularly, and, in no small part, because he’s a great colleague.

Still, I find we keep postponing certain discussions until our next in-person meeting.  I think we’re doing this because 1) we believe we’ll have more time for these discussions in person and/or 2) because we don’t have a white board where we can explain ideas.

My Minimum Viable Solution

I sign up for the World Wide Whiteboard service.  I create a new whiteboard session and it gives me a new URL that I can either drop into an email or something like HipChat or Yammer.

When people click on the link, they provide their email (if the service doesn’t already recognize them) and they see the whiteboard.

While we’re talking on the phone or Skype, we’re drawing in the browser.  Everyone sees this update in real time.  The drawing system is simple.  It only needs to support freehand drawing.  The drawing background is white and the ink is black. (Maybe there are a couple of other colors, too.)  There is an area eraser and an option to clear the whole board.

At any time I can hit a button that will send a jpeg image of the current whiteboard to all of the attendees via email.  When I use the whole board erase function I should be asked if I want an image sent at that time, too.

What I don’t need or want:

  • A built-in chat system.  Between AIM, gtalk, Facebook Chat and HipChat (and maybe even throw in Twitter) I’ve already got way too many options for chatting.  Besides, we’re on the phone when we’re using this.
  • A follow-on to the above point, I don’t want any kind of moderation system or other discussion facilitation mechanisms.
  • I don’t need fancy templates or pre-canned shapes. (Probably)
  • I don’t need the ability to store these whiteboards. (Probably)
  • Extraneous social features.

This product should be drop-dead simple in its appearance and use.

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a.placebetween.us Mention

Posted on December 16, 2011 by

A quick shout-out (yeah, I just said that) to Chris Augeri who mentioned a.placebetween.us on his blog Forest Road!

a.placebetween.us LogoFor those who do not know, (read: everyone) A Place Between Us is a tool that will let you and someone you’re meeting find a good mid-way point for meeting.  You get to pick the type of meeting place, like “coffee” or “thai food.”

This was conceived by Aron and me (and then built by Aron) when we were working on a startup in 2007.  We were working from our homes and always looking for places to meet each other or other people.

Now you know.

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Formtastic Bootstrap: Formtastic Form Generator for Twitter Bootstrap

Posted on November 8, 2011 by

I’ve just released the Formtastic Bootstrap gem. This provides a Formtastic-compatible form builder that will generate HTML to which the Twitter Bootstrap framework can be applied easily.

I was kind of surprised this didin’t exist already! Any feedback and/or contributions are very welcome. You can find the gem on RubyGems and the code on Github.

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Panini 1.1 Released

Posted on September 13, 2011 by

I’ve just released a new version of Panini, a Ruby gem that generates sentences from a given grammar.  This release adds a new derivator that will exhaustively create every sentence in a grammar if called enough times.

Example

This code:

grammar = Panini::Grammar.new

n_s = grammar.add_nonterminal
n_a = grammar.add_nonterminal
n_b = grammar.add_nonterminal

n_s.add_production([@n_a, @n_a, @n_b])  # S -> AAB
n_a.add_production(['a'])               # A -> 'a'
n_a.add_production(['x'])               # A -> 'x'
n_b.add_production(['b'])               # B -> 'b'

derivator = Panini::DerivationStrategy::Exhaustive.new(grammar)
begin
  s = derivator.sentence
  puts s.join(' ') unless s.nil?
end while !s.nil?

Will create this output:

"a a b"
"a x b"
"x a b"
"x x b"

Enjoy!

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Tracy Hoy Clark Sold My Condo

Posted on August 27, 2011 by

I want to take  a few words to recount my recent and very positive experience selling my condo with Tracy Hoy Clark of Chobee Hoy Associates Real Estate in Brookline Village.  I retained Tracy after my condo had languished on the market for 10 months with two other realtors.  Five days later I had an offer which exceeded my expectations.

Tracy quickly came up with a pricing strategy and marketing approach to salvage my disaster of a sale.  She’s very knowledgeable about the area and the market.

At all times she was to the point and made things happen.  She just handled it.  Most of our communication was by text (and some email) which I appreciated.  (I’m not sure if this is always her preferred way to communicate, or if she just listend to what I said to her when we first met.  Either way, yay.)

One place where Chobee Hoy need to up their game is on their website contact form.  I initially tried to get in touch this way and it took a day for someone to get back to me. (Compare this with their Brookline Village competitor who got back to me in 10 minutes.)  However, after that small bump, we were off and running.

Your mileage may vary, but consider me one very happy customer.  If you’re in Brookline Village, Coolidge Corner, Washington Square or anywhere else in Brookline looking for a realtor, I don’t know how you’re going to do better.

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A Rails Rake Task to Dump The Asset Path

Posted on August 21, 2011 by

Here’s a rake task that dumps out the current asset path.  For those who don’t know, the asset pipeline is a major (cool!) new feature in Rails 3.1.  I’ve been working on some gems that provide assets (javascript and stylesheets) and I’ve gotten tired of going to the console to look at the asset path.

Here’s the code:

namespace :assets do
  desc "Display asset path"
  task :paths => :environment do
    Rails.application.config.assets.paths.each do |path|
      puts path
    end
  end
end

Also available as a gist.

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Idea: Coffee Meeting Matchmaker

Posted on August 16, 2011 by

Yesterday’s blog entry by Mark Suster, “Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings,”caused me to come up with (yet another) idea for a product. I’ve passed my 50 coffee mark some time ago, but I in no way take 250 meetings a year, as Mark suggest. And the farther along I get in my career, the more I believe that advice is sound.

But I’ve got a problem. I would take more meetings but I need to find more reasons to meet with more people. I’m not very good at this! So here’s a proposed solution: the coffee meeting matchmaker.

In short, people you know suggest people they know with whom they think you should meet for some reason which they would specify. After both parties agreed to the meeting, you’d set it up and have your coffee.

One possible refinement is that you are not given any recommendations until you make some of your own. Or alternatively you’re given some period of time to return the favor. This seems to be in the spirit of the service.

Another refinement might be requiring more than one recommender before a match is considered good. That is, I would be told I should meet a person until N number of people have said I should meet that person.

This is built off of your LinkedIn social graph. I have no idea how it makes money.

If you build it (or already did,) please let me know!

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